A drive is the part of the computer that takes the disks or tapes you insert into the slot and spins them to make them work. You probably have at least two different kinds of drives in your system: floppy disk drives are the ones with the little slots where you insert floppy disks; the standard type of hard disk drive comes sealed inside a case, which in turn is stuck inside your computer or inside a separate box-you never even see the disk.

On the other hand, there are removable cartridge hard disk drives. Each drive has a large slot in which to insert a cartridge hard disk. Other types of drives you might come across include tape drives (for backing up your files onto magnetic tape), CD-ROM drives (for "playing" CD-ROMS), and WORM or optical disc drives (for storing and retrieving data from WORM and read/write optical discs).